Yerres, from the Exedra, the Porch of the Family Home

The Caillebottes spent their summers at Yerres, a country property about twenty minutes south of Paris that the family had held since 1860. Gustave, still in his twenties, painted it constantly in these years: the kitchen garden, the boats on the little river, the shaded lawns. Here he sets up in the exedra, a curved garden seat lined with busts of ancient philosophers, and looks back across the grounds at the porch of the house. It is 1875, and he is a year away from showing with the Impressionists for the first time, already interested in the plain geometry of paths, steps and railings that runs through all his work. The scene is quiet almost to emptiness, a well-kept garden on an ordinary afternoon with nobody much about. Within four years his parents were dead and the family sold Yerres, so paintings like this are most of what remains of the place.